Head Back to School With the Puppet Labs Workshop

With school back in session and students heading back to class, we're pleased to offer an opportunity for you to do some learning of your own. The Puppet Labs Workshop provides a web-based collection of courses that will help you develop basic proficiency in Puppet Labs technologies at your own pace. New with today's launch is a private cloud environment where you can try out what you've learned. It's a perfect first step on the road to mastery of Puppet technologies, and it's available at no charge.

Each course is 10 to 15 minutes long and covers a single topic in the Puppet language or one of its surrounding technologies (such as MCollective, Hiera, Facter or PuppetDB). There are four learning tracks in all: Puppet, Products, Technologies, and Forge & Modules.

You don't need to know anything at all about Puppet or Puppet Enterprise to get started: The very first course is "What Is Puppet?" and it will help you understand what Puppet is and why it's used. From there, you can take courses on foundational concepts like Puppet DSL resources and classes, then move on to advanced but essential topics like Hiera, Facter and PuppetDB.

Your Own Private Virtual Lab

We're very excited about one component of the Puppet Labs Workshop in particular: Many of the lessons come with the ability to "Try It Out."

After watching a video and reading the exercises, you can click a button to launch a personal cloud environment with Puppet Enterprise installed and configured with Workshop starter code. You can use the environment to try out your own solution or better learn how the example solution works. You just click a button, open up your terminal app, log in, try out your code, then log out when you're done.

The "Try It Out" feature is perfect if you don't want to wrangle virtual environments or install Puppet on your own machine.

Next Steps

Completing the Puppet Labs Workshop is the beginning of the path to complete mastery of Puppet technologies. We'll be adding more advanced courses over time, so check back often and keep an eye out for new material.

After the Workshop you can move on to the Learning Puppet Enterprise VM, where you can learn about the Puppet DSL and Puppet Enterprise in even more detail on your own. Once you've mastered the Learning Puppet Enterprise VM, you can progress to our hands-on, instructor-led classes. You'll get three days of training from our expert instructors, who have trained more than 5,000 people worldwide.

Once you've completed your training, you can earn recognition for all of your learning with Puppet Certification. We offer programs designed to validate your competencies as a Puppet Certified Professional or Developer. You don't have to take the courses to gain certification, but they help ensure you'll be ready on test day.